


it well may be

by ice_connoisseur



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 10:11:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6901693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_connoisseur/pseuds/ice_connoisseur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four oneshots set in various NCIS universes: Tony reaches retirement, the Rota decision goes a different way, Ziva grows out of and into herself, and Kate doesn't die.  </p><p>Note - these are in varying stages of completion and have festered on my hard drive for some four years now.  There's a start, middle and end to each, but the longer ones especially have gaps that were meant to be bulked out at some point.  I've not watched the show in probably three years now but after reading about, and then watching, Family First, I realised that while they never are going to be 100% finished I still want to share them as a nod and a thank you to a show that I once loved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. fernando (how long do you think we're going to be together?)

**Author's Note:**

> I haven’t watched NCIS in close to 4 years now. Ziva’s departure was the nail in a coffin that had started construction somewhere in season 8, and with new shows full of shiny promise (oh Sleepy Hollow, we started so well) to fill my limited time it just…slipped. 
> 
> But I loved it once, and I always kept half an eye on the spoilers in the same way I do old friends on Facebook, long after time and geography has parted us. So I knew Michael Weatherly was leaving and I knew Ziva was wrapped up in it all and so I watched, one last time. It was everything I feared and everything I hoped and everything in-between. I’ve been away from the show too long to comment on the writing or the show-running or any of the politics around the production, but the first episode I ever saw was “Reunion” (tagged on the tail end of my flatmate’s religious CSI viewing when we forgot to turn the channel over). McGee and Tony sniping in front of the elevator and the looks on their faces when Ziva appeared…I don’t know why but it was that scene that made me sit up and go yes, this one, these people.  
> And they deserved better. 
> 
> I don’t write much anymore but for several years I had a particular talent for starting stories and never finishing them. For a while I held on to the delusion that they would one day be completed but realistically, for a variety of reasons, that isn’t going to happen. I enjoyed their creation, though, and some of them I’m even half-way proud of. They're not finished. They're far from perfect. They never will be. The tenses jump around, the POV character shifts without warning, my abuse of the friendly comma is blatant and widespread. But I want to share what there is. And I promise the notes in future chapters aren't nearly so long. 
> 
> ***
> 
> On a sunny day in early July, former Special Agent Tony DiNozzo entered the NCIS headquarters for the final time.

If he’s honest with himself he’s not entirely sure what he’s doing. It’s been years since he worked here, years since he was last even in the building, but something pulled him and in the end he found he couldn’t keep away. He gets a visitor pass from the security lodge easily enough; the name Anthony DiNozzo still carries enough memory and clout to afford him that luxury. The laminated square feels strange pinned to his jacket; he can’t be certain but he’s pretty sure the last time he wore one was when that long-ago young cop from Baltimore followed a strange agent home, and oh how far he’s come since then.

The ding of the lift announces his arrival in the bullpen and he’s met by the same cluster of curious glances he remembers from years long gone. There are no greetings today though, no half-smiles or nods of recognition or demands for payment after an ill-placed bet. There is no one left to recognise him anymore and this group of strangers glance briefly at his face, his visitors pass, and then turn back to their work. He ignores them and heads for the stairs, keeping his gaze fixed firmly ahead in an effort to ignore what he’s not yet ready to see, and by the time he’s reached the walkway above the other agents have all but forgotten he was even there. 

He walks in silence around the upper level, carefully noting and cataloguing each minute change. The Director meets him outside MTAC – unlike most of the others, she does recognise him, Probie of his Probie’s Probie, and acknowledges him with a nod of her head and a raised eyebrow that reminds him so completely of her long-ago predecessor he can’t help but smile. 

But she’s not what he’s here for. Not today. 

Autopsy is empty, but there’s a mug of still-steaming tea on what was once Ducky’s desk, and he can hear a woman’s voice coming from the backroom. He never met the new ME though knows her name, vaguely. What is more important is what she represents; Jimmy’s best and brightest student, recipient of his years of knowledge and experience, and through him Ducky’s as well.

He doesn’t step over the threshold, just stands in the doorway and ignores the voice that does not fit and lets the ghosts wash over, Ducky’s gentle monologues and the splatter-clang of Jimmy knocking something over. 

Yeah. Those were the days. 

There are no bodies out today, just the rows of gleaming silver instruments all in their place and the large steel tables that are probably still the same as his very first visit. It’s an eerie thought, somehow, the cool unchanging steel that has known so many, sailors and marines and drug addicts and jilted lovers, politicians and gang members, the lowliest petty officer and the highest of admirals. 

Kate and Jenny. 

All of them had been equal here, receiving what little dignity and respect Ducky could give them when they’d been robbed of all else. 

He leaves with a smile and a shiver and the knowledge that if he is ever inside that room again he will be in no state to know about it. 

Abby’s lab has changed almost beyond recognition; it’s used as an evidence lock-up these days, shelves filling the large area, but it’s easy enough to see past the superficial changes to it’s former glory, lying just below the surface. He wanders slowly round the space, letting in close in one him, just for a moment, and build up inside. Oh, how this room had buzzed, energy and enthusiasm and love, the thrill of a chase that was very much on. 

If he closes his eyes it’s almost like he’s still there, the music pounding and machines whirring and beeping, Abby spinning around him bubbling with joy and life, her lips sticky on his cheek. 

And then he turns and leaves, pulling the memories around him like a cloak. Tucks in the smell of gunpowder, the rapid clacks of two pairs of hands working a keyboard in sync and the rush of adrenaline when the evidence suddenly all fit together, wraps up sticky-back photos and mops with masks on, countdowns and promises and arguments, the warmth of the knowledge that here, at least, you are missed. He’ll carry it with him for the rest of his days, of that he has no doubt.

The door closes behind him with a click that echoes with finality, and he at last, at last, makes his way back to where he’d started, in more ways than one. 

The bullpen is still quiet, and still no one pays him any mind. Another him – a younger him – might have commented on that, but today he is grateful for it. His attention is centred elsewhere.

Maybe they knew he was coming, maybe someone, somewhere was struck with the sudden thought that oh, hey, that DiNozzo guy’s gonna come round today…Or maybe not, maybe it was just coincidence (and he does believe in them, a little bit, these days), but either way, the four desks are still there, same as they always were, marking the corners of their little patch of territory carved out beside the stairs. Heck, they’re probably even the same desks. Never let it be said they didn’t build things to last around here.

With the weight of his years tugging at his bones he can appreciate the irony of that. 

There’s no sign of the current occupants – a case, perhaps, or maybe they all just upped and left early for the day – so he tugs out the chair that would once have been his, sits down, and god, it’s ridiculous, his life has been filled with desks, before and after this particular one, but sitting here, gazing across the quiet room with eyes clouded with memory, this is coming home. 

These walls, they saw him triumph and fail and god, but he’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Yeah, he wishes there were some things he could have done differently, but if the only other choice was not doing them at all…well. There’s no contest. The family they carved out for themselves here would always be worth it. 

Gibbs and Ziva and Abby and Ducky and Jimmy and McGee. Jenny and Kate, who had filled such tiny parts of his life in comparison to all the time he’d gone without them, and yet left their marks on him still. 

Nothing could be worth losing that.

He closes his eyes and the years drop away. Everything comes together in this room, somehow, everyone, never mind that they’d never actually all been together like that. It doesn’t matter. In his memories he can muddle and meld them into something impossible, wisps of memory and ghosts of long-gone faces becoming solid, for a moment, tangible and real and brilliant. 

And then he opens his eyes and Ziva is there, watching him with that same expression that hasn’t changed in all the years behind them. 

“How did you know where I was?”

She smiles. “I used to be a federal agent. I was trained to investigate by the very best.” And maybe it’s a residue of memory, but her accent, softened by so much time living on American soil, seems thicker than it has in a long time. 

“This is where we first met,” he says with an idle smile, stretching out his limbs in a manner he hasn’t for years and pretending, for a moment, that they don’t ache as he does so. The years stretch between them, the first time they had met like this up until now, and really, whoever would have thought that they’d end up here? 

“I remember,” she nods, amused. “You were having phone sex.”

“Was not.”

She rolls her eyes but smiles all the same. She wasn’t like him, hadn’t understood his need to come and see and remember one last time. Ziva always carried her ties and affections within her, but he…he needed to see. The very best of his years are here, ingrained in every scratch and scuff of the long-suffering desk. The ghosts are stronger in this room than anywhere else, Kate is glaring at him and McGee is typing furiously, Abby buzzing in on a caffeine rush, Ziva is flicking her knife and Ducky and Jimmy are wandering about with reports in hand. Gibbs is storming past with a curt grab your gear, and damn, but it was good. Bloody brilliant, most of the time, and he needed to see it, remember, pay his respects. 

He pulls them all in on himself, just for a moment, loses himself in the memories and faces and lets the weight of those years fill up inside, and then he lets them go, releases them back into the universe and pulls himself to his feet, wincing. Ziva is still standing by what was once her desk, smiling fondly at it and waiting, for once, patiently. He offers her his arm.

“Agent David?”

She laughs at the long-ago title and ignores his arm. 

“Agent DiNozzo,” she smirks instead, swiping his keys from his pocket with an agility that belies her years. 

He chases her to the elevator with a laugh. Neither of them look back.


	2. and now whatever way

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve been offered a promotion. It’s in Rota. Spain. Sun and Senoritas. I’ll have my own team.”
> 
> McGee’s lips part slightly, the beginnings of a but on the tip of his tongue, before he locks them firmly shut.
> 
> It doesn’t matter. "We’re your team" is written all over his face, seeping into the glance he suddenly shoots in Gibbs direction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is…less complete. It’s a skeleton. At one point there were several more scenes planned and a lot more fleshing out intended for what was written. Bits of it are little more than plotting dialogue. And it doesn’t so much end as just…stop. There were whole chunks of Tony and Gibbs hashing through the fallout of Gibbs’ abandonment, the team re-learning one another after Jen dies, Tony and Ziva putting the piece back together post-Somalia, McGee and Tony growing into themselves with the space of an ocean to do so. The Port to Port killer did not feature because…no.
> 
> Quick re-cap; in early season four Gibbs returns from his “retirement” in Mexico and Tony, having effectively led the team for the last few months, gets offered a promotion to team leader at the Rota office. He turns it down and the job instead goes to EJ Barrett, who is in turn reassigned to Washington with the rest of the team from Rota mid season eight. This is a spotted tale of what might have happened if Tony had made a different choice.

He breaks the news over cold coffee and end-of-case paperwork.

“I’ve been offered a promotion.”

No one says anything for a very long moment, and since he’s started, he might as well finish.

“It’s in Rota. Spain. Sun and Senoritas. I’ll have my own team.”

McGee’s lips part slightly, the beginnings of a but on the tip of his tongue, before he locks them firmly shut.

It doesn’t matter. _We’re your team_ is written all over his face, seeping into the glance he suddenly shoots in Gibbs direction.

“You taking it, DiNozzo?” asks Gibbs levelly and there’s nothing there, no anger or hurt or anything even approaching an apology, and so he just swallows once and nods.

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, who knows when an opportunity like this will come again?”

Gibbs shrugs. “Congratulations, then,” he offers, and turns back to his computer.

 

* * *

 

He does it properly. Sorts his apartment, fills in all the paperwork, buys little presents to hide for Abby to find once he’s gone.

And it’s horrible.

Abby cries like he’s dying, not just moving to a different continent, and Ducky shakes his head sadly while McGee wanders round like a puppy that’s been kicked and Ziva folds in on herself like he’s not seen her do in months.

He refuses to just up and leave with a few cryptic comments and no indication of when or if he’s coming back, he will not do that to them again, but some days it takes every inch of his will power to avoid giving in to the temptation to drop everything and just go. It’s what he’s always done before.

Gibbs doesn’t do anything. Tony’s not even sure he’s noticed he’s leaving.

 

* * *

 

McGee comes over a week before he’s due to leave. They sit amongst the packing crates with takeout and beer and get magnificently drunk. For a while they joke and rib each other, but somewhere between McGee’s third attempt to throw an empty carton into the bin and his fifth rendition of how much his hand-eye-coordination is improving, it really is, Tony suddenly slumps back and says, “God, I wish Kate were here.”

McGee comes back to earth with a bump.

“Me too,” he sighs.

“No, I mean, I always do, but now I really, really do. This would be a lot easier if Kate were here.”

McGee squints at him, confused.

“She’d have come with me, see?” Tony explains tiredly, vaguely aware that only alcohol could make him share such a thing. “I’ve been going over the staffing in Rota and they’re woefully undermanned and under experienced. Kate would have come and been my second.”

McGee tries very hard not to let the hurt show on his face. He fails.

“Oh, Probie, don’t look at me like that. I can’t ask you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll say yes.”

“And you don’t want me to come.”

“Of course I want you to come.”

“So why?”

Tony laughs hollowly. “You want to be the one to tell Abby we’re both going?”

Ah. McGee shudders at the thought.

“And Ziva’s position is tenuous enough as it is, I don’t want to draw attention to her by requesting she transfer. But if Kate were here, she could have come, and you and Ziva would still be here, or you could have come, and Kate would have stayed, but either way, I wouldn’t have…”

Wouldn’t have been completely tearing the team apart, he doesn’t say, and McGee understands, finally. It’s not for Abby, not really, though maybe a little bit. McGee has seen how Tony’s been hovering around their returned boss, barely-concealed concern, and he can’t help but puff with pride a little at the thought that he’s only going because he trusts him, Timothy McGee, to pick up the slack.

A bigger it of him wishes he didn’t have such faith, and a huge bit of him is suddenly terrified at letting him down.

“Kate would have gone,” he assures the older agent instead. “Me, too.”

Tony grins. “Nah. You’re better off here anyway. And hey, now you get to be Gibbs Senior Field Agent. I’ve heard it’s a pretty prestigious role.”

McGee sighs and shakes his head. “I’ve never wanted that,” he mumbles quietly. “I always thought there was only one way it would ever happen, and I never wanted to be _Gibbs_ ’ senior agent.”

The inflection isn’t lost on either of them.

 

* * *

 

The first thing he does when he arrives, once his computer is out and hooked up to a rather dodgy dial-up connection, is sit and type each of them an email. Nothing fancy, just a few lines each, but it’s not the contents, it’s the thought behind them.

He’s not dropping off the face of the planet. He may be a bit further away, but he’s still just the other end of a computer.

Email follows email without fail for the next two years.

 

* * *

 

The first time he comes back to the states is for Jenny’s funeral. Ziva had rung him with the news, her voice hollow and very far away over the tinny line.

Suicide. It hadn’t made sense, not at first, not for her, until Ziva had explained.

She’d been dying. Slowly and painfully, and Jen Shepard was never meant to go quietly.

That wasn’t to say she’d made a big show of it; maybe it was one final act of consideration, maybe it was vanity, but she’d done it quietly and calmly in her home study, swallowing the pills with a neck of bourbon.

Tony was kind of grateful he hadn’t been there to see the expression on Gibbs’ face when Ducky had told him that.

He stays with McGee.

 

* * *

 

 “There’s a call for you upstairs, Agent DiNozzo,” the pretty technician says with a smile he responds to almost automatically. “The MCRT in DC.”

The smile slips somewhat to be replaced with honest surprise. It is rare for his team – his old team, he amends crossly, because after three years he’s been without them for almost as long as he was with them – to use MTAC to contact him. Abby and McGee both webcam, often at the same time, while Ziva calls him once a fortnight, and sends emails in the meantime, tersely worded but teasing, and Ducky sends his good wishes with them all.

Gibbs doesn’t contact him. He doesn’t expect him to.

And yet there he is, filling the screen, glaring at the camera in a way that’s so achingly familiar he has to catch the automatic cry of Boss! at the sight of him.

“Gibbs!” he greets instead, letting his pleasure at the contact show in his tone, because three years is a long time and he really is happy to see him. “Long time no speak. And Probie too! I take it this isn’t a social call? What can sunny Spain do for you?”

Later, he’ll blame the fuzzy connection for why he didn’t see the look in Gibbs’ eyes sooner. When he does, Tony’s heart sinks like a stone to settle somewhere round his stomach, because that last time he saw his boss look like Kate’s blood had still been warm on his face.

“It’s Ziva,” whispers McGee, his voice cutting through the static like a whip. “She’s…she’s dead.”

 

* * *

 

They protest that it’s not necessary, that it’s out of his jurisdiction, that anyway, they’re not really sure if they’re even right, and if they are then there’s still no need for him to leave his team. They can handle it.

“I don’t care.” he says flatly. “I’m coming with you.”

“DiNozzo! You have your own team to think about, your own responsibilities…”

“You think I don’t know that?” he snaps back, because really, who is Gibbs to lecture him about his team, his responsibilities?

“We’ve got it covered.”

“Yeah? You and McGee in the desert, that’s really gonna work. You need me for this one boss.”

“I’m not your boss.”

“But Ziva was my partner! You’re saying that if something had happened to Jenny after Paris, you wouldn’t have dropped everything in a second?”

“That’s different!” insists Gibbs, but he falters as he says it, because he’s never been quite able to pin down exactly what happened between the two of them that summer he was in Mexico.

“Bull!”

He’s angry, angry at everyone. Gibbs, for losing her, McGee, for telling him, Ziva, for dying.

Himself, for not thinking anything of it when she’d phoned him a few months before, sounding small and very far away down the phone.

 _I’m back with Mossad_ , she’d said, and maybe if he’d stayed in DC he’d have understood better just how much that would have cost her, Just for a little while. I had a friend, he was working on something, and now he’s dead I need to finish it. It shouldn’t take long, but you might not hear from me for a couple of months. Don’t worry.

He had, of course, but only in a distant, I-hope-Ziva’s-not-killing-anyone-she-shouldn’t-be-killing sort of way.

He should have known not to put so much faith in the love of a man who sent his daughter to kill his only son. Of course Eli David wouldn’t be enough to keep Ziva safe.

 

* * *

 

He goes. Of course he goes, there was no way it was going to be otherwise. Tied to a chair in the middle of the African desert he weaves a tale that sort of was and mostly wasn’t and aches for home in a way he hasn’t since his first week on Spanish soil.

 

* * *

 

He uses up six weeks of leave and stays in America when they return from Somalia. He sleeps on Ziva’s sofa, at first because she’s too out of it to even notice and then because she’s too out of it for him to dare risk leaving her alone. As she recovers, they settle into a routine, of breakfast and errands and physio appointments and dinner and movies. It’s familiar and comfortable, like that summer after Gibbs disappeared to Mexico when she seemed to be the only thing holding him together, but safer too, grounded by their years of friendship and the knowledge that there is nowhere one can go without the other following. It’s easy, too easy, to forget that he has to leave, eventually.

He drives her to work on her first day back, and it takes every ounce of willpower he has not to follow her into the building.

It’s time to go back to Spain.

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t tell them. At first it’s because he’s not entirely sure if it’s even happening, and then it’s because he’s not sure if he’s going to do it, and by the time he’s pretty sure that yes, this is it, he’s a week away from US soil and getting giddy every time he thinks of the look on Abby’s face when she sees him.

Walking into the bullpen it’s almost like the last four years never happened. Nothing’s really changed; the walls are still the same shade of orange, the air still buzzes with the smell of coffee and sweat. And in the little patch they call their own, his team are there, gathered round the plasma with their backs to him. Ziva is rattling off a list of names, McGee is flipping through the relevant pictures, and Gibbs is glaring at the pair of them with his usual get to the point expression, so he sneaks up behind them.

“The wife did it,” he says casually. “Haven’t you guys worked that out by now? It’s always the wife.”

McGee drops the mouse with a squeak and Ziva throws her arms around him in a manner that makes him think she’s been spending far too much time with Abby, but it’s Gibbs he looks to, and damn, if there isn’t an actual smile on his face too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To clarify, my intention isn't that Tony returns to the team proper, a demotion in every sense of the word. 
> 
> No, he and Gibbs sit back to back in the bullpen, but that doesn’t mean they see eye to eye on everything, and maybe he does enjoy winding him up by monopolising Abby’s time a little bit too much, but hey, no one else would get away with it. McGee slides neatly across, straddling two teams for a while, but Tony’s six was the position he’d been training for since the day they met. Ziva stays put and they fill the other desks, and mostly they work separately but when help is needed, it is kinda nice to just have to poke a head over the divide rather than patch a call across an ocean. 
> 
> And that was how this one was meant to end.


	3. bring me sunshine (in this world where we live)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nine things that did not shape Ziva David (and one she shaped for herself)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scattered across various word documents I found several hundred meandering words on the evolution of Ziva and her place within the team. Most are threaded together by Somalia and the repercussions there of, a few are from sporadic episodes through the seasons, and the point of views change accordingly. 
> 
> I’ve cleaned them up and shaved them down and tied them all up together here because the central theme is and remains Ziva (and Somalia), whether as voice or subject. Most was written when I first watched season seven; the final part came out of the start of season eleven.

It’s alright, when she’s there.  Ziva is so completely not Kate – pretty much the exact opposite of her in every way, they couldn’t have been more different.  Kate left a hole, a Kate-shaped gap in their lives, and Ziva doesn’t fill it, she can’t, no matter how hard anyone tried she wouldn’t fit it, but she takes up the space around where Kate isn’t and makes the Kate-hole smaller, somehow, so that it’s still there but not quite so gaping.  And in a world that is so full of reminders of all the places that Kate should be but isn’t, Ziva is a refreshing break.  Someone wholly unconnected to their dead friend, someone with whom there are no memories to associate, off kilter moments when she should be there but isn.t

It’s when she’s not there that the problems start.  Those very rare mornings when Ziva isn’t the first in, when the office is still half dark and it’s far too easy to forget that the desk isn’t Kate’s, not anymore.  Talking to a witness outside their house, the jarring moment when you glance behind you and the figure in the distance is the wrong height, shape, hair the wrong colour.  If Ziva’s not there, it’s all too easy to forget that Kate won’t be, isn’t going to walk in at any moment. 

Sometimes, he thinks he’d have gone mad without her, the living, breathing reminder that things are different now.  

 

* * *

 

It’s a week or so after the case with Gibbs ex-wife that Tony walks into work one morning, sits at his desk, looks over to Ziva’s empty seat and realises from nowhere that at some point in the last couple of months she had reached the point that meant she had been working at NCIS for longer than Kate did.  He could probably work out the exact date, if he wanted to – he can find the date that Kate first started, the date she died is forever ingrained in his memory, and the only hiccup would be in deciding Ziva’s official start date – theoretically the day Jenny assigned her to the team, but somehow it’s always felt like that first morning, when she’d caught him flirting with a ghost. 

He shivers at the thought and forces it from his mind.  They all deserve more time than this.

 

* * *

 

Stuck in a hole in the Somalian desert, Ziva David does not have regrets.  She is prepared to die, because that is the only out left to her now and Officer Ziva David is always prepared.  But she finds herself wishing, sometimes, in the darkness of her cell and the loneliness of her mind.  Stupid, stray thoughts that can’t and won’t change anything yet plague her all the same.  She wishes she had been with Tali when she died, wishes she had realised sooner how far Ari had fallen, wishes her father had been a shopkeeper or a teacher or a marine in the US navy. 

She tries to wish she’d never even heard of NCIS, but such a blatant lie seems pointless.

Instead, she wishes her captor’s breath didn’t smell so inexplicably like Abby’s laughter, because Abby is all that is good and right in the world and she does not deserve to have any part of her found in this dark place.

She wishes she could have the chance to tell the scientist what a comfort it is, all the same. 

She wishes she was back in autopsy with Ducky, safe with his knowledge and his stories, and she hopes, hopes as she doesn’t remember hoping for anything in a long time, that he understands and forgives her, that somewhere he is still pottering around telling tales to all who will listen, and that one of them starts _I once knew a young lady from Israel…_ and it wouldn’t matter how it ended.

That will be a good way to live on, she thinks.  The best of ways

 

* * *

 

Officer Heather Kincade is snarky and mouthy and _definitely_ hot.  She has the air of one who is more than capable of looking after herself, a steely edge that seems to develop on most women working in law enforcement, and she’s evidently smart, quick, and, according to her records, a damn good shot. 

What really shakes him is the niggling idea that _this could work._  

Not straight away, of course not.  There would be a touchy few cases, Abby would sulk, someone would slip up and call her Ziva at least once, but eventually they’d get used to her and she to them and she wouldn’t be new anymore, she’d be part of the team. 

It’s confusing and complicated and he can’t really get his head round it.  Kate died, and Kate was irreplaceable, and the team nearly fell apart but somehow instead grew stronger and closer, and then Ziva came, and she didn’t take Kate’s place but she did fill the absence, made it easier to muddle through those early Kateless days.  And he remembers thinking, at the time, _huh, so maybe this isn’t the end of the world after all,_ and it hadn’t been. 

It could happen again.  He can see it unravelling before him.  Cases and stakeouts and undercover ops with this new dark-haired, brilliant, dangerous woman, and she’d be drawn in and become one of them, part of their family, teasing McGee and befriending Abby and standing up to Gibbs, until one day, maybe in two years or four years or eight, she wouldn’t be there anymore.  Another failure to be added to his ever-increasing list. 

Ziva’s ghost leers at him in the darkness of the observation room. 

Kate died, right in front of him, and some days he can still feel the warmth of her blood on his cheek.  But Ziva…Ziva is missing and Ziva is maybe not coming back but Ziva is Ziva and he’s not ready to give up on her quite yet.

 

* * *

 

“I nearly killed you,” she said, and it was the truth.  When she’d seen them lying there, Tony and Michael and her bloodstained carpet between them, when she had realised what Tony had done, what he’d taken from her, her anger had been immediate and absolute. 

But something had stayed her hand.

She tries not to think about it, but during those long dark months in captivity there isn’t really the luxury of distracting her mind from unpleasant realisations. 

If she had come in to find Tony dead on the floor and Michael alive beside him she would not have hesitated.

It’s not that loves him more, or Michael less – those emotions are too complicated now, one of the few things in her life that she cannot categorise and explain.  Love, no, she has no trust or faith in love; what little she had bled out on a basement floor four years before.  But partnership, teamwork, _that_ she understands, knows as well as she knows anything.

It’s instinctual, her rule one. 

No one hurts her partner and gets away with it.  _No one_. 

She’s just not quite sure when Tony started filling that role permanently. 

 

* * *

 

Ducky takes her back to his house, the night they arrive back from Somalia.  He guides her in his gentle, sure way, from the car to the house, to a sofa where she sits in silence.  She is tired, so very tired, but more than that; helpless, compliant, like a doll.  Not even a glimmer of her usual fire, and it makes the old man ache inside.

He runs her a bath and helps her into it, neither of them concerned with modesty, and while she lies submerged in the bubbles he perches on the edge of the toilet and talks, endlessly, telling her every story he can think of to fill the silence, hoping desperately to generate a glimmer of interest. 

He thinks her lip twitches, just slightly, when he gets to the end of the time he, Jenny and Jethro fled across the English channel, but maybe it’s just wishful thinking. 

When they’ve been sitting there so long he is sure the water must be going cold, he gets to his feet and gently guides her back out of the tub, handing her the clothes Abby had acquired from somewhere earlier in the day.  He leads her to the bedroom and settles her gently under the covers as he would a child, the room dimly lit only by the soft side-lamp. 

Her eyes have been half-closed since they arrived; it doesn’t take long for them to drift shut completely, though she’s not quite asleep yet.  In the silence of the bedroom, he lays one had on her forehead, gently stroking her hair away from her face and whispering stories of what she’d missed while she was away, cases and arguments and pranks.  He tells her how much they missed her, how much better it would all have been if she was there too, how the news of her death had torn them apart and just how far they were willing to go to avenge her.  He desperately needs her to see, to understand, just how loved she is, and he’s in the middle of trying to describe the exact expression on Abby’s face when Gibb’s voice had come over the crackly radio connection (“ _Ziva’s alive, Duck, we got her,”)_ before he realises that Ziva is asleep anyway. 

He settles into the chair besides her bed, pulling out a book and pulling the small lamp closer.  His watch to keep.

 

* * *

 

Standing in front of Gibbs’ desk, staring at him stare at her application, things suddenly seem a lot clearer than they have in a long time.  She _understands_ , now, with the weight of five years and countless cases and a strange assignment that somehow became her life pressing down on her, knows exactly what she wants for the first time in who knows how long. 

She knows their histories, better than they think she does – she was in charge of preparing their dossiers for Ari, after all, all those years ago.  Knows about their childhoods and their families and that C McGee got in tenth grade trig that he would probably die before admitting to. 

Knows how they were picked, one by one, Ducky and Abby and Tony, Special Agent Caitlin Todd, McGee, each one of them carefully singled out and selected by the man they rally round. 

But not her.  By many other men for many other things she has been the first name they called, but never this, the most important of them all.  Gibbs has taught her and scolded her and listened to her and torn the world apart to find her, but he has never chosen her, not in the way he did the others, and she doesn’t have the English to explain to him how important that is. 

 

* * *

 

Abby is delighted and McGee is supportive and Gibbs does that funny crinkly eye thing that means he’s secretly happy and hiding it, but of all of them, Tony is the only one who truly understands the significance of her decision to stay.

She was never meant to stay still, pinned to one job and one place.  Her life was a geography lesson, time measured in countries and cities rather than weeks and months, and suddenly she’s got caught in an elastic band that won’t quite let her loose ever again, not matter how hard she stretches. 

He knows the lessons she must learn, the trivial little pieces about consequences, not upsetting your neighbour today because they’ll still be your neighbour tomorrow, making friends, learning the shortcuts and the way to get the biggest slice from the diner waitress. 

He knows how hard it can be, battling against something you’re not always sure you want but know you can never leave behind.

NCIS had the same effect on him too, after all.

 

* * *

 

It’s only after she’s arrived in Miami that she realises.  Abby has sent her three texts and a voicemail during the two hour flight, which is excessive even for her, but of course…last time Ziva was alone like this, she nearly didn’t come back. 

They keep it up for the duration of her trip.  Abby is the most obvious, but McGee checks in ever day or so, and Tony’s emails are incessant.  Even Gibbs rings her – only three times, but that’s three times more than she was expecting.

It should feel suffocating, but instead it’s almost…comforting.    

Ray comments on it one evening – they’re walking back from a restaurant when a message comes in from Abby, and she apologetically answers it. 

“They like to keep in touch, don’t they, your friends?”

He sounds more amused than put out by the interruption, honestly curious.

“Abby…worries,” she tries to explain.  “When we are not all there.  A couple of summers ago I got into a bit of trouble on an assignment.  It took them a while to find me.”  

Ray doesn’t ask for details.  They already know there are things they cannot push each other on.  She tells herself this is why they are so well suited.

 

* * *

 

She understands her father better with distance, as is often the case.  Understands his pains and his sufferings, the deceptions he has made to get where he is today, and the prices he has paid for them.  She is even beginning to understand the depth of his regrets. 

He is bound by his duty, to his agency and his country, above all else.  It is a noble bond that ties him, the greater good in every sense, and he has sacrificed more than any man should to fight a war that has existed for millennia.  Maybe she is wrong to draw parallels, maybe she shouldn’t equate the weight of a country to a small subsection of the US Federal System, but she does, because they are the only families she has known and the only ones she can look to. 

Where Eli David could not and would not, Gibbs and Tony and McGee and Abby and Ducky could not but did anyway, because she was one of them before she was anything else.  Before she was an Agent or an Officer, she was their Ziva, and they would tear the world apart again and again to see her safe and sound.

During her Mossad days she was always adamant that being Eli David’s daughter would warrant her no special treatment.  She was the best because she was the best, because she had worked for it and slaved over it and bled for it, not because of the luck of her birth.

He had reacted to her disappearance as he would that of any other officer.  That she was his daughter should not and did not make a difference.

But. 

She was his _daughter_.  And that _should_ have made a difference. 

 

* * *

 

She arrives back in Washington on a drizzly day some twenty months after kissing Tony goodbye at a dusty Israeli airfield. No one pays her any mind as she collects her luggage, though the official at passport control offers her an absent-minded “welcome home” as he scans her documents, and that warms her more than two words have any right to.  She is tired and grimy with air travel, but lighter too, demons so entrenched she hadn’t even realised the weight of them until they were at last laid to rest. 

She spots them before they see her, of course.  McGee looks vaguely uncomfortable holding up one half of a decorated banner Ziva is quietly certain was a morgue sheet in a previous life.  At the other end Abby is literally bouncing with anticipation, whipping her head back and forth to scan the crowds so quickly she passes over Ziva twice. She smiles to herself, because she wants to and because she can, and heads towards the waiting pair. 

Later, after the hugs and the greetings and McGee’s awkward stumbling explanation that Tony is stuck upstate tailing a suspect so they’re to take her to dinner and then drop her at his apartment (and she can see that McGee is desperately not trying to draw any conclusions from that and it warms her inside, somehow, because Tony has been her secret for so long and now here it is, whatever it is, causing McGee’s ears to pink and Abby to cackle at his discomfort like there’s nothing secret or dangerous to worry about)…later, after a warm, laughter-filled dinner and a quick stop by the morgue to assure Ducky that yes, she is all in one piece, later, after she’s let herself into Tony’s apartment and helped herself to his bathtub and his frankly obscene amount of toiletries…later, she’s woken from her inadvertent nap by a key in the lock, footsteps in the hall, a warm weight settling down on the sofa besides her.   

The world is a very large place and she has seen much of it and finally, finally, she knows what parts of it she wants for her own; knows what she wants and accepts, realises, understands that she _can have,_ for as long as they’ll have her in return.

The TV clicks on and the sound of Judy Garland quietly warbling fills the room.  She rearranges herself slightly, getting comfortable, and if that results in her pushing closer into the warmth besides her, well.  A raised eyebrow and a pointed smirk suggest her ploy did not go unnoticed, but everyone knows government agents are an overly suspicious bunch anyway.  

They’ll need to talk, later, talk and plan and figure out where the hell things go from here.  But she’s made it here– _they’ve_ made it here – and somehow later just doesn’t seem all that scary, after that. 

_There’s no place like home._


	4. it goes like this

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s your father’s fault, of course,” Kate’s mother had sighed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah. My baby AU of unknown source, the plans I had for you. There’s a part of me that is very sad this will never be complete. 
> 
> Some of it is close to finished, other bits are more skeletal, and many parts haven’t even been written down. But I’m proud of it, proud of the idea and the start of the execution, and I wanted to share it.

Caitlin Todd is eight and three quarters when she dies for the first time, the ground giving way beneath her feet, rushing black and the rattle of earth and pebbles. 

It is a long way to fall. 

The local newspapers plaster her face all over the front pages, hail the durability of young bones, and calculate the odds of surviving such a drop.  What no one seems at all interested in is her dogged insistence that it wasn’t a miracle of survival at all.  She _died_.  She knows it, understands it in a way she can’t explain.  But no one will listen; they smile and pat her head and say _but you didn’t, sweetie, of course you didn’t, isn’t it amazing?_

She may only be eight years and three quarters, but Caitlin Todd is pretty sure that dying and _not staying dead_ is even more amazing. 

Not that anyone listens when you’re only eight.

Eventually, her mother pulls her aside, sits her down quietly and tries to explain.  _It is a secret, darling_ she had said, hands twisting anxiously in her lap _.  A secret for you and I only, and you mustn’t ever tell anyone, not even Daddy or the boys or Rachel.  Keep it secret, or they’ll take you away and you’ll never see us again.  Do you promise, Caitlin?_

She promised, because even at the age of almost-nine, Caitlin Todd understood there were some things you did not talk about. 

(The details of that week of her childhood grow hazy with time, but some things never fade.  The whistle of air rushing past her face as she fell, the blinding pain and echoing dark and jerking force of that first breath. 

The look on her mother’s face as she said _promise, Caitlin, promise,_ fear and worry and that tinge of horror that never quite seemed to fade. 

She hadn’t known, Kate would work out years later, not for sure, not until then).

 

* * *

 

She is nineteen when her father finds her, floundering in her first and last year as a law student.  He turns up unannounced at her door, smiles and introduces himself, and over the course of the evening she laughs, cries, slaps him, apologises, slaps him again, and finally hugs him goodbye.  He explains, as best he can, what little he knows and understands, and it helps, to finally talk about it. 

He doesn’t stay, though – can’t, apparently, though a little part of her thinks _won’t –_ and though he keeps in touch, mostly by letter and later by email, it still feels a little like abandonment for the second time.  That scares her almost more than her mother’s distanced lack of understanding, because it is the complete opposite.  He does understand, only too well, and the distance here is due to fear of a different sort. 

Fear of loss and failure and rejection, fear of being too much and not enough and never quite fitting in.  Her own fears magnified a thousand times, and it’s like he’s holding up a magnifying glass to all the ways it can and will go wrong. 

But at the same time, it gives her a sense of relief and release.  Be happy, her father whispered into her hair as he kissed her goodbye, and she loves him for that, for wanting no more from her than she wants for herself.

She quits law the next day.  That was always more her mother’s dream than her own, and she’s finally beginning to understand that nothing she does will ever be enough to apologise for something that isn’t her fault in the first place. 

 

* * *

As secrets go, it’s actually a pretty easy one to keep.  The Secret Service isn’t nearly as filled with explosions and brushes with death as the glossy network shows would have the public believe, and the occasional near-miss is easy to gloss over as luck or chance.  Her superiors scold her for being too willing to take risks, too quick to put herself in danger to come to the aid of others, but when it comes down to it, the first requirement of a bodyguard is willingness to die for the person they’re protecting, and Kate never hesitates.  She knows the danger of being found out, but it doesn’t stop her.

It’s not entirely selfless; if someone dies where she could have done so instead, she would have no choice but to live with the guilt.

 

* * *

 

NCIS…complicates things. 

If she’d been thinking straight she’d have realised right from the start what a bad idea it was.  Federal agency it may be, but these people aren’t bodyguards.  They are investigators, trained to see what others miss, so Tony loves to remind her, and it terrifies her that one day they might finally see what no one else ever has, some outward sign of her inner abnormality. 

At first it is just exposure she fears, her mother’s tense words, _they’ll take you away, little one, and we’ll never see you again_ , but as time passes it starts to dig deeper than that.  Exposure, maybe, she could take, but not rejection, not again, not from these people. 

 

* * *

 

And then she goes and gets shot in the head.

 

* * *

 

She wakes with a gulp of air, panicked and hurting and dazed, and the first thing she sees is Tony staring down at her, frozen, his face splattered with her blood.

No one says anything for a very long time.

 

* * *

 

Abby and Ducky are waiting for them, anxious and confused, in Abby’s lab.  Abby gasps when she sees the blood on Tony’s face, almost falls over when she sees the stain on Kate’s back, but Ducky takes one look at the expression Gibbs’s face and stills her with a gentle touch. 

“Is something wrong?” Abby whispers, eyes darting from one to the other, her _family_ , apparently tearing themselves apart at the edges. 

"Kate got shot on the roof,” explains Tony in the same monotone he’s been using for the past two hours.  “In the head.  Smack between the eyes.  Dropped like a stone.  And then, and here’s the funny thing, she’s lying there completely dead when suddenly she’s breathing and blinking and moaning about a headache.  Yeah, Abby, I’d say there’s something wrong.”

They all turn to look at Kate, standing by the door as if unsure of her welcome, arms wrapped tight around herself.  She shrugs and attempts to smile.

“I don’t know either.”

“Really?  Because you didn’t seem that surprised,” snaps Tony, and Kate doesn’t flinch, she _refuses_ to flinch.

“No.  I’ve known the what and the why for a long time.  I’ve never understood the how.”

“And you never told us?!” Tony explodes.  “Never thought it was worth a mention, of yeah, by the way guys, I _can’t die_?!”

“Oh, I can die as well as anyone,” Kate snorts.  “It’s the staying dead that is proving tricky.  And what was I supposed to say?  Why on earth would you have believed me?!”

“We’re meant to be a team, Kate!  You’re supposed to trust us!”

“I do!”

“Yeah?  Well you have a funny way of showing it!”

“Enough.” interrupts Gibbs, his voice quiet but full of steel.  “DiNozzo, McGee, I want you back on that roof.  Find me anything that might tell us where Ari’s gone now, and pick up that damn bullet before someone else sends it to forensics and finds Kate’s brain all over it.  Abby, anything you can give me.  Ducky, take her downstairs and check her over.”

Kate sighs, not even bristling at the way Gibbs is refusing to use her name.

“There’s nothing to see.  I’m a federal agent, I’ve had as many physicals and medical tests done on me as the rest of you.  If there was anything it would have been found by now.”

Gibbs doesn’t even bother glancing in her direction as leaves the room.

 

* * *

 

Ducky examines her in his calm, unflustered way, adapting his autopsy equipment for medical use as he has done so many times before. 

“You can take some blood, if you like.” Kate offers at last, if only to break the silence.  “I don’t mind.  I don’t want you to get into trouble with Gibbs.”

“Why would I do that, my dear?  They wouldn’t tell me anything I don’t already know.  You are in perfect physical health, apart from what I imagine must be a severely painful headache.”

Kate blinks, surprised.  “I’ve had worse.  But that doesn’t…I mean, I don’t think you’ll find anything a horde of government physicals missed, but Gibbs is gonna want to know you at least tried.”

The doctor stares at her for a moment. 

“Caitlin,” he began at last, picking his words with great care.  “Do you believe our esteemed leader sent you to me so that I may attempt to uncover the reasoning behind your miraculous recovery?”

“Of course.  Why else?”

“My dear, you _died_ in front of him.  Unless I’m very much mistaken, his primary concern was to ensure there was no lasting damage.” 

“But he was so angry,” Kate frowns.  “Tony too.  The looks on their faces…”

“They had just seen you gunned down in front of them.  Tony is covered in your blood.  Their anger, at this moment in time at least, is from an entirely separate source.  They are probably hurt that you did not tell them, yes, but that will come later. Right now they are far more concerned about the fact that Ari Haswari killed you this afternoon.  The fact that you didn’t stay dead is completely beside the point.”

 

* * *

 

“Hey, Kitten!”

“You know I don’t like it when you call me that.”

“I’m just happy to hear your voice.  How are you?”

“I got shot.”

A sigh.  “Where?”

“In the head.  Straight between the eyes.”

“How many people saw?”

“My boss and my partner.”

“Do you need me to straighten things out?”

“Of course not.”

“Katie…”

“Don’t call me Katie.”

Another sigh.  “Kate.  Are you sure?  I can have you on the first plane to Cardiff, they won’t even realise you’re gone until it’s too late.  If they tell anyone, if someone comes for you over there, I don’t know how long it will take me to get to you.”

Kate twists the phone cord round her hand, wishing that it was last week, wishing that it was all a bad dream and she’d wake up tomorrow and everything would be normal, Tony wouldn’t be avoiding her, Abby wouldn’t be staring at her like she was some sort of freak, Gibbs wouldn’t be shooting terrorists in his basement with some Israeli spy as backup instead of her…

“No.  I don’t want to leave unless I have to.”

“It might be too late by then.”

Kate pauses for a moment, her eyes wandering to a picture Abby had got the waitress to take when they’d been out for drinks on McGee’s last birthday.  Her team smiles – or, in Gibb’s case, smirks – back at her. 

“No.  No, I don’t think it will be.  I trust them.”

A third sigh, longer and louder than the rest. 

“I want to hear from you at least once a day.  Just something to let me know you’re ok.”

“I promise.”

“And Kitten?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

He hangs up before she can formulate a response. 

 

* * *

 

It takes a while to get things straightened out, after that, but the point is they get there, and Kate begins to hope that maybe they always will

 

* * *

 

It’s not that she doesn’t like Ziva David, not exactly.  There is just something about her that makes her uncomfortable, and it’s got nothing to do with the fact that her brother killed her.  It’s the way she looks at people, as if they were…targets.  Seeking out their weaknesses and secrets to be exploited. 

Caitlin Todd knows a thing or two about secrets. 

Of course, the way Tony and McGee and even Gibbs keep fussing over her doesn’t exactly help, not when they seem to be almost avoiding her. 

It’s not as if she’s a part of their team.  Sure, the new director said she should work a case or two, get the feel of how things are done in NCIS, but that was four cases ago, and now the Israeli sits in her pokey cubicle behind McGee’s desk and does a really poor job of pretending she’s not listening to every word that is said. 

And Gibbs lets her get away with it!

More than that.  He encourages it.  Every other day it’s Ziva, can you find this, or Ziva, I need you to do that.  And sure, she’s got some useful contacts, but they managed without her before!

Though a lot of things were different before. 

But suddenly McGee and Tony are partnered pretty much full time and if they’re called to a crime scene she’s always the first one sent back to the yard, to sit at her desk and coordinate searches and put out BOLOs and that would be fine if she thought it was actually useful, but if computer work was suddenly so important, McGee would be far better at it than her, and she can’t shake the feeling that Gibbs is just getting people used to the idea that she’s not going to be around very much longer.

“Your door was open.”

“Always is.”

She stands in silence for a while, watching as he continues to sand, calm and even.  She would kill for the man in front of her, die for him a hundred times over if he asked her to, and she is suddenly incensed by the way he’s been repaying that loyalty.

“You know, if you want me gone, you only needed to say something.  This hazing is low, Gibbs.  I thought better of you.”

“Hazing?” he looks over at her, actual surprise on his face.

“Whatever you want to call it.  I’m not stupid, Gibbs, I can see what you’re doing.  But if you want me gone then I’d rather you told me to my face, rather than slowly brush me under the carpet.”

“I don’t want you gone,” he shrugs, turning back to his boat.

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

He glances at her, one eyebrow raised.

“I’ve been out twice in the two weeks, Gibbs, and even then it was to crime scenes you sent me away from as soon as you possibly could.  You’ve been partnering Tony and McGee without variation, any excuse you can find to keep me at my desk and you take it…I’m a good agent, I’m damn good at my job, and if you can’t put one little incident behind you then just tell me so I can find somewhere new and Ziva can take my desk.”

“You got shot, Kate!  You should be dead!”

“I can’t help it!  You think I want to be like this?  Keeping secrets from everyone I know and love, having to watch as they put themselves in danger to save my life when it never actually needs saving?”

“You really think I care about that?”

Kate falters for a moment, remembering Ducky’s words. 

“Then…what?”

“You got shot.  You should be dead.” Gibbs sighs, tossing his sander aside and heading for the bottle of bourbon on the side.  “You _were_ dead.”

“And then I got better.” points out Kate softly, beginning to understand.  “Gibbs, you can’t…protect me, not like this.  Keeping me holed up in the yard.  Our job is dangerous.”

“You think I don’t know that?  Damnit, Kate, I know that better than anyone!”

“I can’t stay if you’re going to keep wrapping me up in cotton wool like this though.  I mean, lets face it, I’m safest of all of us.  When we’re all victims of a firey car crash thanks to your driving, I’m gonna be the one walking away afterwards.”

The fear of the scenario bleeds into her voice – not the car crash, necessarily, but something, someone, killing them all, Tim and Tony and Gibbs and even Ducky and Abby, leaving her behind to pick up their pieces.  Wordlessly, he handed her a jar.

“You know I can’t stand this stuff.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I’m staying, then?”

“That’s up to you.  Always has been.”

“What about Ziva?”

“What about Ziva?" 

“I mean…well, she’s been working with us a lot.  It’s easy to see that you like her.”

“Did I show Tony to door when McGee came?”

“Well, no…”

“Ziva’s got talent.  Like Tony, like you, like McGee.  I like talent.  But I’m not about to clear out your desk just yet.”

 

* * *

 

Three days later, they get a dead petty officer in Deep Creak Park.  Gibbs keeps her on the scene for ten hours, and when she finally stumbles back to the yard, half dead on her feet and functioning mainly on caffeine, she can’t remember a time she was happier.

 

* * *

 

 

The next time she dies, everything is different again. Gibbs is gone, she is Tony’s second, Ziva sits at McGee’s desk and somehow they’re still just about muddling through. 

It’s a bullet – of course it’s a bullet, in this job what else could it be? – but this time it seems she is to be denied the quick and relatively painless death of a head shot.  Instead, she’s lying on a wet alley floor at midnight while Ziva frantically tries to find the worst wound and stop the bleeding.

Kate wishes she wouldn’t.  The pressure thing really is very painful. 

“I’ll be alright,” she manages to slur around the haziness of her mind.  “You don’t need to do that.”

“You will be fine.” agrees Ziva in a clipped voice.  “You will lie there and not move and listen to me talking and do not dare close your eyes, Caitlin Rose Todd!”

Kate flutters her lids open again with a reluctant groan.  “This would be a lot easier if you’d just shoot me in the head.  I’ll be fine in no time then.  Apart from the headache.”

“You are delirious.  I am going to contact the others and an ambulance.  They will be here soon.”

“No ambulance.” insists Kate, struggling weakly.  “No hospitals.”

“You have been shot at least four times, Kate, and if you do not keep still then there will be no ambulance because you will be dead, and I am not going to be the one to tell Abby!”

"She’s gonna be mad,” she agrees with a giggle, lying back down again.  “But don’t worry.  McGee and Tony will explain when they get here.  I’m gonna be fine.”

Ziva continued to talk and then shout, demanding her attention in a way that was really quite rude.  Didn’t she see that if she’d just let her die, this would all be over far quicker? 

She wished Tony were there.  He’d probably shoot her if she asked. 

 

* * *

 

Jenny doesn’t even raise an eyebrow when Tony requests Ziva fill the empty slot on their team.  That’s pretty much the only good thing to come out of the post-Gibbs mess; at least they don’t have to put up with some probie, at least Ziva knows, maybe even understands, at least some of the deranged complexities that make up their team.

Kate’s not there when Tony explains it to Ziva, after the alley shooting incident.  He had insisted McGee drive her back to the yard, despite her repeated protests that she was completely and utterly fine, and threatened to assign her to desk duty for a month if she made a fuss about Ducky examining her. 

Much later that night – technically very early the next morning – she is woken by pounding on her front door.  Ziva stands there in her running gear, her blank expression carefully in place.

“Why aren’t you still asleep?” Kate groans, stretching.  The other half of their merry band had spent three more hours scouring the area for any sign of their perp before finally returning to the yard, and Tony had promised them another long day today. 

“I have not been to sleep.” says Ziva shortly.  “There was too much to think about.  Tony says you do not die.”

Kate sighs.  “I wish they’d get it straight.  I do die, just not for very long.”

“He said it is a…genetic thing, yes?”

“It comes from my father’s side”

Ziva shakes her head slowly.  “And the others, they all know about it?”

“I’m sorry, Ziva, it’s nothing personal.  They all found about before you came, same way you did, really, when I got shot by…”

She trails off.

“By Ari, you mean?” finishes Ziva softly.

Kate nods. 

Ziva’s eyes were unfocused, staring into the middle distance.  She looked suddenly very young, vulnerable, completely unlike the self-contained officer Kate had to admit she enjoyed working with. 

“Even after he died…even after I heard what he said to Gibbs, saw what he planned to do…I do not think I ever quite believed your story that he shot to kill and missed you on that roof.  I knew Ari enough to know that he would never have missed such a shot, not unless it was on purpose.  I had no doubt he would have killed Gibbs, but you…I think I still hoped there was enough of my brother left that he chose to let you live.”

“I’m sorry, Ziva,” sighs Kate, knowing it was inadequate but needing to say it anyway. 

“I am not.  I am…very glad you are not dead, Kate.”

 

* * *

 

Do they really want to do this?  Risk their careers and possibly their lives for the stray dog that sniffed around the edges of their team for a year but has only really been a part of it for three months?

When Ziva faces down her would-be assassin and snaps that she’s _not just a killer anymore_ , Kate hides her smile and manages not to shout _I told you so_ at the FBI agent’s faces.  Ziva is one of them now, no matter what she might have done in the past, she’s part of their team, has her place amongst them and knows their deepest secret.  She’s not going anywhere.

Of course, it gets a bit more complicated when Gibbs returns - a lot of things get a bit more complicated when Gibbs returns – but with a bit of creative thinking and some furniture rearrangement, they get by. 

 

* * *

 

 

When Kate was three, her mother married a widower with four children.  Philip Todd loved his stepdaughter in his quietly unwavering way, and in return she adored him with every inch of her being, but he never really _understands_.  Not just the Secret; she is too stubborn, too determined, too driven for the softly-spoken teacher. 

She never regrets it, the anchor those steady years of her childhood give her, but for all that she loves her stepfamily she can never quite understand them.  She knows they never quite understand her. 

 

* * *

 

Gibbs is never a father figure in her life.  She admires and respects him, would kill for him in a heartbeat and die for him a hundred times over, but she doesn’t feel that same tie to him that holds Ziva and Tony and Abby.  She has the father who raised her and loved her as his own, and the one who came back for her before she even realised she wanted him to, and that seems quite enough to be going on with. 

It allows her to challenge Gibbs in a way the others won’t, face him down when she disagrees, because she can live with his anger and disappointment. 

It means she can’t forgive him the way the others seem to, when he comes back from Mexico.  Maybe they’re used to being let down by the people they trust, but Kate refuses to allow that to become normal for her. 

She never understands how he failed to see what it did to them, how his abandonment sat with the team that rallied round him. 

When Jack leaves, years later, she finally realises how they were so ready to have him back.  

 

* * *

 

Three weeks after her birthday she walks into work one morning to find her father perched on the edge of Tony’s desk, hands in pockets, completely at ease. 

“Kitten!” he cries upon seeing her emerge from the lift. 

“What are you doing here?!” she hisses in horror.  There is no sign of the others yet, but the last thing she needs is for Tony to pick up her father’s ridiculous nickname. 

“I was in the area.  Thought I’d drop by and say hi.”

“You know where I live.”

“Yeah, but this way seemed more fun.  I get to see the infamous NCIS!”

“What do you want, Jack?”

“Can’t a man stop by and see his daughter?”

“Not when stopping by involves a transatlantic flight.”

He looked her up and down for a moment, studying her with closer scrutiny.  “Not even to say happy birthday?”

“That was three weeks ago.  You sent a card.”

“It didn’t seem like enough. You’re getting older.”

Kate hesitates, picking up on the underlying meaning.  She isn’t blind, she’s well aware that her father has not aged in any visible manner in the fifteen years she’s known him, and that he has lived many more years than his birth certificates would have people believe.  She had never considered that it might happen to her too. 

“At least one of us is,” she says at last, trying to think of the best way to ease his mind.  He would not wish his fate on anyone, no matter how much he loves them, she knows that. 

 

* * *

 

He does end up meeting Tony.  And the rest of them.  He flirts with them all, of course, even Gibbs, but she’s not sure he can really help it, and mostly it’s just funny watching the expressions on her boss’s face. 

They go out for dinner the night before he returns to Cardiff.   It’s a warm and easy evening, and Kate can’t even bring herself to care that people keep mistaking them for siblings.  Her father is calmer, more at ease with himself than she’s ever seen him, and she’s about to tell him as much when he beats her to it.

“They’re a good bunch, your team.  I can see why you like them.”

Kate smiles and nods, because, well.  She’s not about to dispute that.  “I know.”

“You’re happy, with them.  I’m glad.  And I’m sorry I doubted them.”

“You seem happier too,” Kate observes carefully.  For all that her father likes to be involved in her life, he’s amazingly close-mouthed about his own. 

But he just smiles, and nods in acknowledgement.  “I’ve got a team of my own now, actually.  Odd bunch.  Snarky as hell.”

Kate grins.  “Sounds perfect.”

 

* * *

 

Maybe it comes with the genes, maybe she’d have had the talent anyway, but all her life Kate has been able to _sense_ , in a way, when a person is dying.  When she was eleven, they went to visit her Grandma Todd in Maryland, and she had cried the whole way home.  The phone call had come three days later. 

She doesn’t want to accept it, at first.  For all her failings, for all her short-sightedness, she really, truly _likes_ the redheaded director of NCIS.  She is firey and determined and able to go up against Gibbs without backing down, and there are few women Special Agent Caitlin Todd admires more. 

She doesn’t deserve this, the slow, painful drift away, trapped in a body that is betraying her. 

She had nightmares for a while, after they got back from LA, about arriving too late, discovering Jenny lying in a cool pool of her own blood.  She had woken each time filled with relief, thankful for once for Ziva’s ridiculous driving, for her own quick thinking. 

But over time, watching as the once-proud woman slips away bit by bit, she begins to wish she’d listened to that second sense, the one that told her Jenny Shepard’s time was through. 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s different with Ziva. 

Ziva who once said she would never let them take her alive, but who spent four months in hell clinging onto _something_ , never quite giving up completely no matter how much she might have wanted to.  Something held her, something holds her still. 

It makes no difference what she says.  The world is not yet done with Ziva David, and Ziva David is definitely not yet done with the world. 

 

* * *

 

Everyone – and by everyone, she mostly means Tony – assumes that the Catholic thing is because of her mother.  Which is bollocks, really.  She has her mother’s looks and her father’s genes, but her religion is completely and utterly her own, carved out in adolescence never to be relinquished.  The traditions and ceremonies and rituals, familiar no matter where she goes or how much time passes.  She can’t lose that comfort, that automatic acceptance into a community.  If she lives to 90, she’ll be buried with full mass.  If she’s still going at 900, if she’s lost everything and everyone she knows now and forgotten it all besides…at least she’ll still have that, two thousand years and more of faith behind her, the weight of a billion people’s belief to home and ground her.

It’s not really something she can explain, but of all of them she thinks Ziva might come closest to understanding.

 

* * *

 

“You and mom,” Kate asks, the last evening of one of her father’s impromptu trips to Washington.  She’s slightly tipsy – not drunk, just well-oiled enough to face a question that’s bothered her ever since she first met her father.  “How…”

 “Did we meet?” asks her father with a wicked grin.  He, dreadful man, never seems to be effected by alcohol, no matter how much he drinks. 

“Well.  Yes.”

Jack laughs.  “You’re as prudish as the Brits.  I was trying to hunt down an old friend, but I missed him.  Your mom was living with a friend and working in the university library for the summer; we met in a bar, and I ended up hanging round Washington for a couple of months.  She was something else.  Fiery.  A true child of the sixties.  We had some good times together.”

Kate looks at him, relaxed on her sofa with a fond smile on his face as he remembered long-ago years, and tries to reconcile the picture he is painting with the straight-laced, upstanding PTA member who had raised her. 

“So what happened?” she asks softly. 

Jack shrugs ruefully.  “She loved me.  I couldn’t give her what she wanted.  We argued.  She didn’t understand, there was so much I couldn’t tell her…and then, one night I was walking her home and I got into a…bit of a fight.  I was stabbed.  Luckily I came round before anyone else got there, but your mom…well, she didn’t take it too well.  Understandable, really.”

“And then there was me.”

“No.  I didn’t find out about you til later.  I was back in the Washington, thought I’d call in and see her.  Your mom had moved back to Indiana, but her friend still lived in the same apartment.  Gave me an earful.  I went out to see her.  You were three weeks old.  You threw up on me.”

“I always was a good judge of character.”

“Yeah.  Well.  She told me on no uncertain terms I was to get out of your lives and stay out.  I’d ruined so much for her, I couldn’t do anything but agree.”

“She had no right to do that.”

“She had every right, Kitten.  I broke her heart and ruined her life.”

“I don’t care.  She shouldn’t have just shut you out like that, you had a right, _I_ had a right…”

“She did what she thought was best.  She knew enough about me to know I was dangerous, and she was right.  She just wanted you to be safe, and happy.  She loves you, Kitten.”

“She has a funny way of showing it.”

 “She worries about you.  You had a good childhood, Katie, be glad of that.  Your mum was right to send me away.  You love your dad, I know you do.  I couldn’t have given you what he did.”

 Kate thought of the man her mother had married when she was three, the quiet, ever-patient man whose name she bore, and tries to imagine Jack in his place.

 She can’t.

 “Look.  I’m not saying she’s perfect, but she did her best by you.  And me.  You know I picked your middle name?”

 "She never said.”

 "No, she’s good at that.  But she gave me that, and enough information that I’d always be able to find you.  She just wanted to protect you, Kitten.”

 

* * *

 

Vance is nothing like Jenny.  He is cool and detached and his face is impossible to read, and Kate doesn’t trust him, no matter how much Gibbs seems to.  He sends her to the archives when he breaks up the team.  It’s a probie job, glorified secretarial work, checking and signing off evidence from decades-old cases, boring and dull and _safe._ No chance of anyone stumbling across her secret down here, unless she tries to kill herself from sheer boredom.  At least McGee is in the next basement; Tony is hundreds of miles away and Ziva is…god knows where Ziva is. 

Her days are spent cross referencing and making sense of obsolete filing methods and signing thousands of forms.  Her evenings she spends pouring over their casefiles from the last three years, marking every success, highlighting in every way she can think of exactly why they as a team amount to so much more than the sum of their parts. 

Night after night she carefully pieces their case together.  There’s nothing else she can do in the face of Abby’s despair and McGee’s stoic acceptance and Gibbs’s typical silence.  The false cheer in Tony’s postcards gets harder to bear with every passing week, and Ziva’s perfunctory emails are telling in their sparsity. 

She wonders if they’ve been in contact with each other. 

 

* * *

 

“So,” says Abby one evening, plopping the drinks down on the sticky table between them.  “Ziva and Tony.”

Kate sighs, and shakes her head.  “I’ve got nothing, Abby, no more than you.”

“But you were with them _all the time._ Surely you must see _something.”_

“Maybe there’s nothing to see.”

“Oh no.  There’s something.”

Kate has to concede on that point.  It scares her, sometimes, the intensity that pulses between her two friends.

“There’s a line, though,” she sighs, trying to explain it to the scientist.  “They won’t cross it.”

“Exactly,” smirks Abby, triumphant, her point proven.  “None of the rest of us have ever had need for a line.”

Kate laughs and the conversation moves on, but it nags at her all the same.  When she gets home she emails Tony the photos of Ziva in a bikini on a whim; if the Israeli ever finds out not even Abby would be able to connect her to Kate’s death, but somehow Kate doubts Tony will ever let on that he has them. 

He never mentions them either, but his second day back on dry land he brings her a pastry from her favourite bakery and goes an entire morning without throwing anything at her. 

Except things don’t go back to normal after that, despite her hopes.  Tony’s not quite as carefree as he was and McGee is more outspoken, and Ziva…Ziva is keeping secrets.  Kate knows that look all to well. 

It’s only a matter of time before it all blows up in their faces.

 

* * *

 

Her father rings almost six weeks after Gibbs and Tony return from Tel Aviv without Ziva.

“Kate?”

“Jack?” she blinks, because although the voice sounds like her father, it is tireder and older than she can remember ever hearing before. And he never calls her Kate.

“How are you?”

She looks around the bullpen.  All is quiet, each of them pouring studiously over paperwork.  No one is even pretending to eavesdrop on her conversation.  She thinks of Abby downstairs, alternating between anger and confusion, Gibbs’ transition from selective mutism to all out brooding silences, the lost look in Tony’s eyes that he doesn’t even attempt to cover with false cheer. 

She doesn’t look over at the empty desk that was Ziva’s.  None of them do.

“I’m…ok.  We’ve had a rough couple of months.”

“Anything I can do?”

Kate sighs, the noise rustling over the phone line.  “No.  No, not really.  Did you want something?”

His turn to sigh.  “No.  Not really.  Juts thought I should let you know, I’m going travelling for a bit.  Off track.  You won’t be able to get hold of me for a while.”

That breaks through her otherwise occupied mind, makes her sit up and take note.

“Jack?  Is everything ok?”

“Yes.  No.  It’s…it’s been a rough couple of months here too.  I need to get away for a bit.  Take care of yourself, Kitten.”

He hangs up before she can reply.  She doesn’t hear from him again for three years.

 

* * *

 

They refuse to let her go to Somalia.  It only needs the three of them, they insist, and she gets that, gets that Tony has to do this, even if she doesn’t quite understand the bond between the agent and spy she understands that he needs to do this in a way they do not.  And she doesn’t even consider that they go without Gibbs, but why send McGee on a suicide mission when she could do the same thing and walk away at the end of it?

Because, explains McGee through gritted teeth, _because_.  If he gets killed, he gets killed, but if they discover her secret then gods knows what they’d do to her, and she’d have no way out, no chance of final escape. 

It’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever done for her.  She hates him for it.

 

* * *

 

Rachel rings her out of the blue one evening.  It’s not that they don’t get on, exactly, it’s just that they both have very busy separate lives, and while she has to love her sister that doesn’t always equate to liking her. 

“Look, I’m probably breaking some sort of law doing this, and definitely my contract, but I feel I should warn you.  The psych department are onto your team.  They don’t like you, they don’t like your methods, they don’t like that none of you have reported for any sort of mandatory counselling in years…they’re sending someone to watch you, and if the whole lot of you don’t pull yourselves together then they’ll rip you apart.”

Kate clutches the phone for a moment, terror and dread and a sickening sense of oh-god-no, because after everything, this can’t be what’s going to tear them apart.

“Who are they sending?”

“Me.”

 

* * *

 

She has her little apartment and her plants and her cat.  She has her father, occasionally, and her Dad always.  Rachel and Toby and James and a football team of nephews and nieces between them. 

She has her team.  She has Abby’s laughter and McGee’s stutter, Ziva’s quiet ferocity and Tony’s terrible humour.  Ducky’s patience and Gibbs’ gut.  The memory of Jenny.  She has long afternoons pouring over evidence, the smell of sketching paper, the rush that comes when things finally start to fall together.   She has each passing year, marked by grey hairs and wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, by the steady rotation of the earth beneath her feet.  Her dreams are filled with starlight, some vestige of her father’s genes, but her days are filled with earth and work and family, the day to day routine of a life so wholly worth living.

 

* * *

 

 

(and she lives, and she lives, and one day, in the fullness of time when the living is done, she dies.  And that is all she could ever ask for).  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, there was so much more of this. Kate and her sister, Kate and Ziva (a friendship I have many, many feelings about), her mother, Gibbs, Jack leaving and Jack coming back...all of it. But there we go. 
> 
> For those who were wondering, based on airdates/in show timelines Children of Earth (the 456) and Ziva’s disappearance in Somali would have both happened at the same time. The 456 didn’t crop up stateside because reasons.

**Author's Note:**

> This one was actually pretty much done, but I was never quite happy enough with it to post.


End file.
